Personal profile

Scholarly biography

Nita is the academic lead for Nursing in the School of Health Sciences; within this academic leadership role she is responsible for all the pre-qualifying nursing courses (approximately 800 students) achieving strategic and operational objectives. She also regularly teaches on the pre-qualifying courses and is a module leader within the HEA fellowship accredited PgCERT: Transforming Practice for Health Professionals through education where she was the previous course leader.

Nita is proud to be a qualified nurse who has significant clinical experience gained from the UK and abroad; she was invited to be a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2018 following notable attainments in Higher Education that included her award for excellence in facilitation and empowering student learning from the University of Brighton in 2014. Her current role involves leading a large team of academic staff, developing and implementing key quality assurance strategies, developing curriculum and influencing various funded pedagogic projects. Her external professional and academic networks are significant both nationally which include the Nursing Midwifery Council, the Royal College of Nursing Educational Forum and International Group and internationally with the Sigma Theta Tau, the European Nursing Network and the University of Calgary.

Her teaching and learning expertise involve pedagogy for work-placed learning, internationalisation activities, global health and clinical decision making in addition to her community nursing interests. Nita also has skills in transforming students through education and curriculum development; here are examples of funded recent scholarly activity:

The identified lead for a funded project by Higher Education England focused on practice learning for u/g nursing students in the South of England (2018 – 2019)

Invited expert for Quality Assurance Review of curriculum development for an Undergraduate BSc (hons) Nursing course at UK university 2018

She is a reviewer for the following journals: The Journal of Allied Health, the International Journal of Practice-based Learning in Health and Social Care and Nurse Education in Practice.

Research interests

Nita`s research interests are associated with her professional context of Nursing and more recently in work-placed learning pedagogies. She is interested in researching the learning about, through and at work with a particular focus on how this is positioned by the individual who is bounded by the workplace. Her Professional Doctorate in Education completed at the University of Southampton identified the dualism of Social Capital in sustaining the practice and work-related learning of Nurse within an unfunded European Nurse Education Network. Her research in her MSc Community Nursing awarded from London Southbank University explored Clinical Decision making in District Nurses and her research from her first degree awarded from Kings College, London explored role transistion in junior sisters.

She is currently consolidating this research through publication of her findings, dissemination and exploring how creating social capital can enable learning and sustain practice for participants within a work setting alongside developing both novice educators and student belonging to the nursing profession. An impact output has been achieving with colleagues a small grant from the Centre for Learning and Teaching grant to develop a resilience building initiative in curriculum design for the pre-registration Nursing Programme (2018 – 2019). Nita is currently working with a research team from the University of Calgary on phase II of an international study exploring how to prepare Undergraduate Nursing Students to Recognize the Deteriorating Patient.

Supervisory Interests

Nita is interested in supervising PhD/Professional Doctorates related to her area of scholarly expertise and/or research interest as a secondary supervisor initially. She has supervised numerous Master level research with recent exceptional successes as follows:

Evaluation of teaching for a perioperative safety culture: How the use of narrative pedagogy influences perioperative practice towards a safety culture.

Primary Care Team Effectiveness – Developing a framework applicable to Canadian family health teams.

Nita has been invited to undertake Doctoral training supervision and participated as a panel member on a transfer from Mphil to PhD at the University of Brighton titled: The nature of care that is co-produced between District Nurses and Frail older people.